#veterinary science

[spindle-and-nima]

This might be a bit of a graphic question, so feel free to ignore it or DM me an answer if it's too much, but I am curious; how exactly does a degloving incident heal? It sounds like the kind of thing where you'll never really get the limb back to normal after it happens. I'm curious about it but a bit nervous about looking it up online, and I am mostly curious about how well rabbits recover from it anyways.

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the kinda gross question. I think medical stuff is really neat, even if it's morbid at times.

Not morbid at all to me! Its a good question

So essentially unlike humans, rabbits have a gap between the muscle and the skin. Its part of their survival physiology that if they are grabbed by a predator, their skin tears away and let's them escape. Literally like taking a coat off.

So when it rips away, the concerns are heat loss, infection, and fly strike. And it's very painful. The limb itself is sore but still definitely functional if no muscle was torn too. The bun who had the leg degloving is already using his leg more.

It heals. The skin basically grows back from the edges like closing a cut, then fur starts to grow. Fur can def be very patchy and not as smooth as an undamaged coat but it absolutely can grow back. I change dressings every 2-3 days then, when I see the skin is recovered, I stop covering it and keep up with ointment until its well and healed

[er-cryptid]

wildlife bio was really popular on one of the prev polls, so--

favorite field related to wildlife biology and environmental science

animal rehabilitation and care

botany and plant science

conservation biology

ecology

entomology

environmental science

marine biology

natural resource management

oceanography

wildlife educator / public outreach

wildlife management / technician

zoology

Voting ended onMay 20, 2025

[equinesandeducation]

Fully into one of the hardest weeks of this internship, but managing so far, and also sort of having fun! 😅

[so-i-did-this-thing]

I bought this old book just on the grounds of the irritated horse alone. It's like Kate Beaton's fat pony has reached its unruly teenage years.

Published in 1900 in Chicago (I know the preface says Philly, but the publishing info says otherwise), love how it immediately begins with some shade.

If you are a fan of the All Creatures Great & Small books, you will recall similar shade at the "dark ages" of veterinary science. We're in an interesting transitional phase in this volume -- stuff like penicillin is still a ways off.

This is set up largely like a glossary. I wish there were more illustrations, but it's still fun to flip through and tempting to reference if I write any All Creatures fics set before the show begins.

Did Siegfried Farnon write this?

As an aside, this paperback is in stellar condition (aside from the spine), whilst any pulp printed after 2010 is absolute gobshite. Paper quality has gotten so bad, even just in my lifetime. I can't tell exactly when this was published - all other copies I have found have been hardback and the paperback seems odd. Still a fun bit of veterinary science history.

I find old manuals like this fascinating. I have my eye on a beekeeping one next...

[nyxxycat]

All those veterinary technique videos are like "Today I'm going to teach you how to take the temperature of a cat. First, you need an exceptionally well behaved cat that does not actually exist anywhere in this world. I got mine from an alternative dimension."

[scienceguy22]

The great cow-tipping conspiracy.

I grew up near a farm in Ontario before my family moved to Quebec, so I ended up learning quite a bit about farm life & farm animals. City folk have quite a lot of misconceptions about farm animals. Take the cow, for instance. There's a belief that country folk like to tip over cows for fun. This is a flat-out lie. To begin with, cows don't sleep standing up, so you wouldn't be able to sneak up on them, startle them & quickly push them over. Cows need to lie down to sleep because that's when they get their REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is crucial for memory consolidation, learning, brain development, brain repair, restoration & alertness. A study by researchers at the University of Tennessee shows that cows deprived of the ability to lie down can't get REM sleep.

Hypothetically, even if they did sleep standing up, cows weigh 3 times as much as a baby grand, which weighs 500 lb (226 kg); their center of mass is low & their stance is wide, so a person trying to push a cow over would require 2,900 newtons (N) of force to push one over. A newton is the force needed to accelerate 1 kg at 1 m/s², so you would need a sideways push of 650 lb of weight. But humans cannot generate 650 lb of horizontal push; even elite athletes max out around 300-400 lb of force in a controlled environment. Cow2s are basically biological refrigerators with legs. In addition, cows are easily spooked; they would either take evasive action & simply run away or start trampling people. The same thing goes for horses. True, they can sleep while standing, but only for naps or light sleep. They too need to lie down for REM sleep.

The next farm myth is that straw & hay are the same thing. No, it isn't. Hay is dried grass, clover, alfalfa, timothy, or legumes—anything livestock like to eat. Straw, on the other hand, is made from leftover stalks after grain harvests (wheat, barley, & other grains). It's inedible & is generally yellow in color. It's used as bedding, not food. Finally, let's tackle some bull. It is not true that bulls don't like or are afraid of the color red, despite what you see in bullfights. Cows & bulls cannot even see the color red. Cows have only photoreceptors, meaning they are dichromats, so they see only blue & yellow. Cows/bulls can detect light up to 555 nanometers (nm) in wavelength; the color red is between 620 & 750 nm. Cows can't see red. Red looks grayish-brown to them. Bulls charge at movement, so the bull reacts to the flapping of the matador's cape, & the red is there for humans.

[typhlonectes]

Harris (@beetlemoses)